A sleepless night of stomach pain, and through it the music to The Great Conveyor went round and round my head, as will inevitably happen with a new tune. A poor way to spend the extra hour. It's made today tiring and frustrating for no other reason, but I've continued work as I could and made some achievements.
First; re-editing the Alice interview to set the audio in sync. It appears that FreeMake has a bug in the conversion which causes audio to slip out of sync. A direct extraction of the audio from my camera was slightly longer in time than the separate audio recording. Perhaps the hardware is at fault. It becomes a problem with any video over about four minutes in length, and at the maximum of 17 minutes it's rather serious. I managed to digitally shrink the separate audio recording to compensate, but the maths is irrational. The reduction isn't, for example, the equivalent of 30 to 29.97 F.P.S. (which I might have expected, even though I'm not actually converting frame rates at all). It appears to be about half-way between, but not exactly. Annoyingly, the video is perfectly in sync as an avi or avs in VirtualDub, but when converting in FreeMake, the results are out of sync. Well, I've done all I can.
After that, more work on The Great Conveyor today, which is just about finished apart from the vocals, which appear to be in an unsingable range. It's an amusing point that I included a middle section to match the music of another track called Lost, but this one seems to want something else to follow from it, and I might not include Lost at all. During a walk I had the idea of waking from the dream to a ticking clock, and the voice of a dead relative.
This song starts with a bell and clock tick rhythm, a drone-like song that inevitably leads to a dramatic chorus. More work to follow this week. I may attempt The Great Conveyor vocals. I normally like to conclude vocal work on the entire album at the end, rather than one track at a time, but things might sound better if I make an exception.
I added a feature to my software a few months ago to set the internal tuning up or down as much as an octave, so in an emergency, I could re-tune the entire song in a click to make it easier to sing, but this would upset the structure of the whole album. A lot of it is in D minor, and should remain there. It would be easier to modify the melody, and the ideal is to expand my vocal range.
One other small thing done today is doubling the texture resolution in Future Snooker, which is set for a release next month.
